Posted on 09/29/2012 3:50:42 PM PDT by marshmallow
Until recently traditional Muslims and Salafists lived harmoniously side-by-side in Tatarstan. No longer
FOR years Tatarstan was held up as a model of stability and tranquillity as the Muslim-majority republics of the Russian north Caucasus became embroiled in a separatist conflict that spawned a still-continuing civil war along religious lines. More than half of Tatarstan’s 4m people are Sunni Muslims who have long enjoyed friendly relations with the rest of Russia. Kazan, the regional capital on the Volga river 450 miles (724km) east of Moscow, is a prosperous and attractive city.
That sense of calm has changed since July, when assassins shot dead a prominent Islamic leader, Valiulla Yakupov, and nearly killed Tatarstan’s chief mufti, Ildus Faizov, with a bomb detonated under his car. The exact motive remains unclear but many in Kazan seem to think it is related to the public campaign of both men to combat the rising influence of Salafism, a fundamentalist form of Islam.
In Soviet times, Islam in Tatarstan was largely a means of ethnic identification and had something of a “folk” character, says Akhmet Yarlykapov of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Yet in recent years Salafism, which has gained followers throughout the Muslim world, has made inroads in Tatarstan, especially among the young. Migrants from the republics of the north Caucasus and the post-Soviet countries of Central Asia have also spread more conservative interpretations of Islam.
Estimates of the number of Salafists in Tatarstan vary. A local mufti, Farid Salman, says the public figure of 3,000 is probably far too low. The older generation and those in official religious structures are wary of the Salafist groups, seeing them as imports and gateways to radicalisation. After he came to office in early 2011, Mr Faizov started to remove conservative imams and banned religious textbooks from Saudi....
(Excerpt) Read more at economist.com ...
Islam and Russia have been co-existing peacefully?
Then who the hell are the Chechens? Or in some parallel Orwellian universe, have the Russians and Chechens always been at peace?
They NEVER had these kinds of problems under Stalin.
A bit misleading. Political Islam is largely an invention of Moscow itself, which used Islamo-Marxism is a tool to turn the Muslim world against the United States and its allies. Many known Muslim terrorist leaders have had ties with the Russian KGB/FSB. In fact, Alexander Lintvenenko, the fellow who was poisoned by Polonium 210, had alleged that Russia had recruited and trained Al-Qaeda’s former number two man (now number one).
There is no living peacefully with islam - ever.
Yep.
Even muslims can't do it.
I was in Tatarstan in 1994. Tatars flew fighter jets over their capital, there were green flags, crowds of muslims gathering here and there to listen hate speechs from crazed imams. They looked on infidels like predators on their prey. It was pretty scary for non-muslims who knew about atrocities being commited by Chechens at the time, which has started in exact same manner a few years earlier.
All of this islamist crap disappeared in a few days after the First Chechen War started. BBC aired airstrikes and all the dead and devastation. As a rational people, tatars shaved their beards and got rid of hijabs that same moment. Instead of attacking infidels they kicked imams’ behinds down to Saudi Arabia.
My idea of islamism it’s pretty controllable in middle class societies among people who has something to lose. Fear is a main factor. Muslim are pretty calm and friendly people as far as they know that their traditional behavior will bring them hell.
In fact both political islam and islamist terrorism are British invention. British intelligence is all the way behind Hizb-ut-Hahrir a first of it’s kind terrorist organization designed to deter Israel back to late 40s. Brits viewed Israel a threat and an American tool to take an upper hand over the British influence in the Middle East.
Soviets took a bit advantage from this crap in 70s, true but it was alive and well earlier.
If you really want to look into a Russian-designed regimes and Islamo-Marxism learn about Baathism and look at Saddam’s Iraq, Assad’s Syria, pre-Muslim Brotherhood Egypt and Lybia.
All of the above were secular lower middle class societies to some extent. Islamic extremism was brutally controlled and non-muslims were protected via KGB-style institutions.
I tell ya, wherever Islam goes peace follows.
It looks like it backfired on the Russians.
The title does not match the fact in the article.
The coexistence in question is (or was) between radical Muslim in Tatarstan and the traditionally (*) quite docile Tartars; in other words, the subject of the article is the ethno-religious politics of a relatively small region inside Russia.
This docility is apparently coming to an end due to the influx of more radical Muslims from, for example, Chechnya.
Tatarstan was a model of peaceful coexistence also in the sense that the relationships between Russia proper, Christian Orthodox overwhelmingly, and Tatarstan, overwhelmingly Muslim, were indeed harmonious. But unlike in North Caucasus, the tension is between two kinds of Muslims, not, so far, between the ethnic Russians and the ethnic Tartars.
However, none of that can be projected to a wider theater of relations between Russia proper (i.e. culturally Orthodox ethnic Russians) and various Muslim lands in the Russian Federation. There, the picture varies region to region: two brutal wars in Chechnya, tense but not violent anymore rest of North Caucasus, peaceful Tatarstan and Bashkorstan.
Of course, Russia lost her satellite formerly Soviet republics, that are now independent.
Tartars are remnants of Great Mogols hordes who invaded and dominated Russia for a few centuries. At the end Russians subverted their culture and government structure making them kind a vulnerable and then militarily destroyed their urban centers. It become possible as soon as Russians fond a way to corrupt some of their aristocracy and Russians also had a firearm technology while Tartars still relied on bows. A lot of people initially welcomed Russian subversion as their lifestyles seemed to be an improvement over their spartan military-style islamist regime. By mid 16th century all the remaining Mogol Khanates were incorporated into Russia and their leadership were killed or forcefully baptized.
Tartars were calm for centuries but some closet revanchism emerged in earlier 1990s.
I think it is very important for Russians to contain it because Tartars are actually a huge minority just like African-Americans in US. They are present in every part of the country in huge numbers.
This presumes that peoples keep their identity for many centuries. The Tartars were a strategic enemy of Russia throughout the Middle Ages, but at the present time they are one Muslim minority among many, and are much easier to live with than North Caucasian Muslims. The “revanchism” of the 90s was simply asserting the ethnic identity free of Communist lies; every people in the Russian Federation did that, yet only in Chechnya rebirth of ethnic and religious institutions lead to war.
This bears repeating (and remembering)!
Especially since the American Left is eager to remember that while Reagan armed the Mujaheddin in the Soviet-Afghan war, but forgets how Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and the PLO were all clients of the USSR before that.
The Soviets never considered religiosity of the Third World a big problem as their real enemy was not religion in general but specifically Christianity. As the author rightly notes, Islam was treated as simply a charming folk culture.
On the other hand, Arafat, Nasser, Assad the Dad, and Hussein were not religious man in the Wahhabi mold either.
Communism changed after Lenin, who originally still believed in a universal, stateless world system. Gradually under Stalin, and especially after World War II with the anti-colonial movements, Communism morphed into a many-faceted nationalist platform in which jingoistic nationalism was exalted for "oppressed peoples" and their religions championed against that of the "foreign devils," who were usually chrstians of one sort or another. I suppose this is why today our post-Marxist Gramscian Left exalts the shamans and spiritualities of "de, 'ow you say, indigenous pipples" every bit as often as it slams chrstianity with "science" and rationalism. Then there are some combinations of the two: the American Black church, for instance, worships in a fundamentalist style but its ideology and concerns are those of European naturalism.
At the risk of being misunderstood and causing offense (and it is not my intention to hurt or offend anyone here), there is a certain similarity between historical chrstianity and post-WWII, anti-colonialist, Third World Leftism: a "universal" ideology becomes inculturated to various ethno-cultures all over the world, is blended with the folk-beliefs that preceded it, and exalts a Jew (in this case, Marx) who becomes a universal nationalist symbol for every country and people on the earth except for Jews and rednecks.
No, what offense? You are exactly right. All leftism is a mirror-image of Christianity: a worldwide pseudo-religion where the state is worshiped, that picks the social tools of the Church and perverts them into service of its pagan gods.
The anti-Christ will be believed because people will confuse him with Christ. That's all by design.
Since then Russia has continuously had the Ottoman turks, the Turkic Central Asians as their enemy
In the 1700s they fought 7 wars with the Turks and Iranis, pushing them back slowly
In fact Russia right from 1453 saw itself as the successor to the Byzantine Empire hence locked in a holy war with the Turks. They believed this right until World War I, when one of their aims was to conquer constantinople.
RaisingCain -- I'm sorry but political Islam is the invention of Mohammed
Islam has been political right since its inception. Islam has continuously been against the US and its allies, even before the USA came into being
The Saudis are the enemy -- they have spread this virulent Wahabbism to the Maghreb, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Indonesia etc. etc.
Correct -- all were secular and the jihadis were killed off. The problem is, thanks to Obama, all of that is changing
We should never have taken out Saddam in Gulf War I -- he was threatening the Saudis and they got their "blue eyed slaves" to protect them. By keeping troops on SAudi soil, Osama got the excuse to attack on 9.11
WE have been played for fools since 1990
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